Fancy Clapping cover

Here is the front cover of Fancy Clapping, due in spring from Your Scrivener Press. The image was made by the great and good Gary Barwin. The cover itself was designed by Chris Evans for YSP. Advance orders are available at www.yourscrivenerpress.com

POEM

Have you ever written a poem

for yourself, for no one else

but yourself, and read the poem

to the sky on a clear night?

Just the stars and your poem,

you and the breeze in the dark,

over the legendary hum of cicadas.

What else? A memory

dog-tailing this memory.

Fancy Clapping update

The cover for Fancy Clapping should be available for early blog posting in a few weeks.

Right now, working on a new sequence of poems. Updates will follow.

 

 

New Book: Spring, 2012

I’ve just signed with Your Scrivener Press for the proposed spring publication of Fancy Clapping.

The collection, written from May 2010 to August 2010 and revised November 2010 and again May to July 2011, consists (as of now) of 42 poems, including two long poems, “Fancy Clapping” and “Found Missing.” The title poem, consisting of 32 couplets, is an experiment in rhythm. While “Found Missing,” made of 25 modified cinquain stanzas with roughly 15 syllables per line, is a look at myth, law, gender, sex, and hubris. The collection deals with mortality in, I hope, a humourous way. Can’t wait to see what it looks like.

In other news, I hope to have a collection of short stories together by next year, and two novels are on the go – one slowly, the other very slowly.

Ghost Music, Nominations, and the Blinding Echo/Ego

I suppose it might be considered bragging, if I thought anyone read this blog, to say that Ghost Music (BuschekBooks) has been longlisted for the fabulous ReLit Award. If you, who probably aren't reading this post, haven't heard, the ReLit is given out to three books -- one novel, one collection of poetry, one short story collection -- published by small Canadian presses. True to its motto (Ideas, Not Money), The Relit Awards awards the winners with a beautiful and coveted ring ("My Precious!") with four articulated alphabetic bands for spelling out four-letter words (or short sentences: "Iwin," for example). I've only seen the ring in pictures, and in my dreams, so I can't say for sure what it's like, but I can think of a whole lot of four letter words that need spelling.

I am honoured to have Ghost Music listed alongside all those great titles. That's reward enough, isn't it? "We wants it, we needs it" -- oh, cut that out!

The Auld Kirk, Thessalon, Ontario, & a parade

An afternoon in Thessalon, Ontario, birthplace of both my father and grandfather. Played in a great-sounding room in The Auld Kirk, a cafe, concert hall, gallery, and cultural space run by Mr Tom Carnahan. It was the first time that a parade ran through one of my sets. Today was Thessalon's community celebration. So, after a couple of tunes, we all took a break to watch the parade. It was a blast. I'll be back on October 1 and again later that the month, or in mid-September. A nice sounding room.
Here's a snippet from the set. A tune called "Every Time We Begin," bootlegged by the ever-lovely mapi.

A New Short Film

Hold on to your popcorn, folks, and turn the lights low. This time out we have a psychological thriller. Are you ready to face _Loo's Mirror_?

Ghost Music reviewed by Greatest Lakes Review

A review of GM from Michigan-based Greatest Lakes Review:

ghost music by mark d. dunn

BuschekBooks, $17.50

 

Canadian poet and musician Mark D. Dunn has a serious eye for the things all around us, as well as a serious ear for music, and he puts them to use in this book of poems. Filled with beautiful, rusty words about rivers and mountains, bird and people, the poems flow with all the qualities of a good song. Strong images and concrete, sincere narrations are the backbone of this collection, and they are sturdy. This is a gem of a book by a brand new author, and it's not one to miss.
Rating: 4/5

 

http://greatestlakesreview.weebly.com/book-reviews.html

 

 

 

Twenty Feet and a Seagull

A new short film from the producer of the short films _Birthday Wishes_ and _Dog's View From A Moving Car_: TWENTY FEET & a SEAGULL

Poetry Month Reading

Way back in April, 2011, the League of Canadian Poets sponsored a reading at the Sault Public Library. I was honoured to share the event with poet Jena Schmitt whose Catchment Area (Signature Editions) is just marvelous. I've worked some of Jena's poems in the poetry class and found that students loved them. Jena also graciously agreed to visit the class last fall.
The April event was much fun, although short. Only an hour was allotted for the evening. Yet, it was fun and we got to hear Jena Schmitt read -- what more can you ask?


The pictures here were provided by the founder of the Sault Library writers series, poet Mark Peltonen.

RIP Robert Kroetsch (1927-2011)

Just days before his 84th birthday, Alberta poet, novelist, teacher Robert Kroetsch died on the highway while returning from a writer's festival. Kroetsch's work as writer and teacher is fundamental to Canadian literature. I never felt he received the recognition he deserved. He is what some might call a "writer's writer." And what a writer. I knew him only through his poetry, novels and essays, but count Mr Kroetsch has one of my great teachers. Here is a video that opens with a passage from his novel _What the Crow Saw_:

Alan and Archibald Sullivan

Poets grow from rivers. Walt Whitman had the Hudson and the Potomac. WC Williams the Passaic. Even Emily Dickinson who, if we believe the rumours, did not get around much had a river that ran to her lover, imagined or otherwise. What’s so big about rivers? They divide space: rive, riven, river. They move through time: the same river twice. And they move toward the unknown. Rivers are a source of creativity, awe, and fear. One need only stand on banks threatening to flood to know the power of rivers.

Our river (Bawating, St. Mary's) is unique, of course. It’s the only natural outflow from the world’s second-largest body of freshwater. And like other rivers, The St. Mary’s has spawned a few poets.

The most famous early Sault poet is remembered more for his adventure novels than for his verse. The oldest son of the area’s second Anglican bishop, Edward Sullivan and wife Frances, Alan Sullivan (1868-1947) was born in Montreal, another river city, but came of age in the Sault. His novels, including The Rapids (1922) which fictionalizes the 1903 Lake Superior Consolidated riots, are rooted in the formative experiences of traveling with his father through the northern diocese. In one collection of poetry Venice and Other Verse (1893), now long out of print, Alan Sullivan recounts a discovery made deep in the woods:


A glade in a forest of beech and oak,
And a hurrying brook, which softly spoke
In ripples and eddies of field and fen,
And haunts unstained by the steps of men:
A little way back from the water’s edge
A great pine clung to a rocky ledge,
And flung its shadow athwart a cross
Of rough-hewn wood, half covered in moss:
Here in the peace of the deep woods’ breast
A worn old huntsman takes his rest,
With naught but the wash of the wandering stream,
And the sigh of the wind through the maples’ crest,
As the monotone of his endless dream.

“The Trapper’s Death” Alan Sullivan

Is it good poetry? Probably not. Is it important? You bet it is.


The Sault’s poetic heritage is well represented by the Sullivan family. Archibald, the youngest of the Sullivan family, was born in Sault Ste Marie in 1885, making him the city’s first genuine literary export. According to a biography of Archibald in Canadian Singers and Their Songs (1919), “The music of the waters of Lake Superior in their wild rush over the rapids was the first sound to greet his ears” (265). But for all that watery influence, Archibald seems to have been obsessed with flowers not rivers, judging by a series of descriptive horticultural poems. In his short lifetime, he died in New York at the age of 34, Archibald was met with a critical appreciation that had eluded his older brother. Archibald’s poems and short stories were published widely, and for good reason.

Notice the religious imagery and the speaker’s frustration at the social conditions he witnesses in “The Cold Poor”:


High crucified on every winter's night,
Bound to the cross of every wind that blows.
Frost on my lips that leaves a kiss of blue.
And on my head the thorns of driven snows.

Sleep may not lay her hand in that of Pain
Or Hope trail silver gannents through the dust,
For Fate decrees the lines I have to read,
Hell is what is and Heaven but a crust.

This little poem, published in Appleton’s Magazine (1907), juggles Christian imagery, images of winter, and the cruel fact of poverty – not an easy task. It was writing like this that brought an international audience to the works of poet Archibald Sullivan, the Sault’s first literary export.

New Poems

Happy New Year!
This blog has been neglected. I had thought about resolving, not in a new year's kind of way necessarily, to make daily entries but just find too many other fun things to occupy my time. That, and nothing I'm up to seems really blog worthy. It may be time to redesign this here thing so that it has a theme. Any suggestions for a theme? Sport socks, perhaps? Flotation devices?

I have been working on some new poems. In fact, they are getting old in that the manuscript was completed in August, 2010. I've let it sit around for five months (although it's also sitting around on the desks of a couple of editors), and have just begun the latest round of revision. The manuscript has been called _Fancy Clapping_ until now, and retains this title for now.

Here is a reading of a poem from _Fancy Clapping_: "The Screen Behind the Curtain."



Thanks for reading. Keep warm.